


summer slipped us underneath her tongue

by aratayy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, for Salad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:15:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26187055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aratayy/pseuds/aratayy
Summary: All the windows are open. Summer is a weather draped along their skin, a light sheen of sweat filling him with restless energy. His foot taps against his thigh, again and again, and Harry grabs it.“Stop moving, won’t you?”“Oi, keep your eyes on the road.” Draco raps his knuckles against Potter’s forearm.---aka that road trip!drarry fic, with a dabble of British politics I know nothing about.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 40





	summer slipped us underneath her tongue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [caelesalad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/caelesalad/gifts).



“Taylor Swift? Really?”

Potter smiles wildly, his hair somehow trying to both get into his eyes and point towards the sky at the same time. Draco would have raised an arm and pushed it out of his eyes, if it wasn’t so messily attractive in a way Harry Potter was.

“Should’ve known not to let you make the playlist,” Draco grumbles. “If it’s more of those horrible pop songs-“

“I’m driving, remember?” Harry replies, splaying his hands on the wheel. “And the driver gets to pick the songs.”

“No one has agreed to that rule,” he tries half-heartedly. “And that is _incredibly_ unfair-“

“It’s not my fault you’ve never gotten a driver’s license.” Harry says, annoyingly blasé, and turns up the volume. Draco smarts, tries to ignore him smirking.

_We're happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time_ _  
It's miserable and magical, oh yeah-_

“We’re not 22,” Draco slumps down in his seat. “We’re 18. And we’re on a run from murderous pigeons. And my boyfriend refuses to stop assaulting my ears with noise.”

“I’m 19 in a month,” Harry points out. “And those pigeons were not murderous. Hungry, sure. Not murderous.”

“They tried to eat my shoes.”

“Your shoes kinda deserved it.” Harry shakes his head. “Who wears leather boots on a road trip, drama queen?”

“ _I_ do.” He crosses his arms. “How further is it, anyway?”

Harry tosses him the map, and Draco looks at it with disdain before slowly opening it up. There are a lot of markers on it, a lot of squiggly looking things, and Harry has scribbled something incorrigible on one corner.

Draco looks up, nods decisively. “Not much left,” he says, and Harry hums.

“Yeah. Three more days to go.”

“Three _more_ -“ He shuts up, but Harry’s already laughing at his face.

“You’re so useless,” Harry says, his hair flopping against the wind.

“Yes I am,” Draco acknowledges easily. “But I am hot.”

“That you are,” Harry nods decisively back, and they’re both grinning out at lots of fields of nothing, and this is the road trip Draco has envisioned, and it’s so perfect some part of him thinks something is about to go horrifically wrong any moment.

It makes him hold his breath, that sensation of impending doom. But nothing happens, while he waits in silence for one, two seconds, three, and Harry grips his hand.

“This is nice,” Harry says. “I don’t want it to end.”

Potter can be like this, painfully honest, and always it makes something in Draco ache. He knows he would never be like that. He knows he would always talk in circles, hide behind his walls.

Harry makes him wish he wasn’t like that. Harry makes him feel ashamed of the person he is while making him proud at the same time, that someone like Harry Potter could be in love with him.

“Yeah,” something in his throat dislodges. “me too.”

“But it’s fine, Malfoy.” Green eyes twinkle at him. “We have until end of time.”

* * *

They kiss lazily, one hand entwined and the other exploring. Potter traces his lips over his jaw, and it’s hot, too hot, and Draco has to get his clothes off.

“Remember when we first met?” Harry murmurs into his ear.

“Is this relevant?” Draco gasps back, shaking off his shirt, and they’re back at it, sliding skin over skin.

“You looked really stupid, you know. That hair.”

“You loved it,” Draco shoots back, and he slips his hand down Potter’s pants, and it’s a petty but successful revenge in how Potter arches his back. He dives at his mouth, pushing Harry down to the hotel bed, and everything sort of whitens after that. Draco feels only in sensations, everything hot and wet and _Potter_. He drowns his world with him.

“Yeah.” Harry mutters back, when Draco can again form coherent sentences in his mind, not just _oh_ and _Harry fucking Potter_ and extensive swearwords. “I did, didn’t I.”

* * *

Draco watches the rain patter off the window, tracing the tip of his fingernail down the trail of the waterdrops. The music is off, and Harry’s driving in calm silence, two hands steady on the wheel. Draco turns to look at him from the side-that hair those eyes those lips- and wills him to speak.

“We don’t have to go there,” Harry says, and Draco bites his lips, because while he did want him to speak, that sentence was pretty much the last thing he wanted to hear. He closes his eyes, pictures their destination, pictures them meeting her, and doesn’t have to picture the lurch in his stomach.

They had been babies when Potter’s parents organized a strike against the ex-Prime Minister, Tom Marvolo Riddle. The renowned activists, or, well, _infamous_ activists, -depending on which side of history you were on-, never quite got to watch his removal from office; they were killed in an untimely and _incredibly_ convenient traffic accident, a week before what would have been their biggest demonstration.

Riddle resigned, shortly after the not-quite-accidental accident, due to the protests against his pro-war and anti-marginal tax rate policies and, of course, Potters’ deaths, that swept the entire nation. Baby Harry had been the face and symbol of the movement, the figure-head that kept the fire raging.

Until a few years ago, Britain had thought they had seen the last of Riddle.

“Weren’t you the one convincing me that I _had_ to go?”

Potter sighs softly, a small sound. “I know I did,” he murmurs. “But I’m having second thoughts about my sanity at that moment.”

“I have second thoughts about your sanity _all the time,_ ” Draco tells him, but it lacks a bite. And then he knocks his head against the window, decides to be decided, for Potter’s sake.

“I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t agreed with you,” he says, and Harry smiles offhandedly.

“And I thought you were here for my company.”

“And the sex, of course,” he adds. “Definitely not for your horrible music taste.”

Harry raises a brow, and Draco groans out loud. “Don’t you dare turn-“

He does something with one of the buttons on the wheel and a voice blares out on the speaker- “ _My head gets messy when I try to hide_ _, the things I love about you in my mind-“_ -and he covers his face with his palms.

“I have no idea why I’m here,” he says.

* * *

The next day when they emerge from the inn, the sky is bluer than his eyes.

“No,” Potter replies, like he’s ridiculous. “There’s nothing bluer than your eyes.”

“How would you know?”

“I just do,” Harry grins at him, and he hates to blush but blood rushes to his cheeks. Potter grabs his hand, and they meander to a café across the street, him muttering something about local coffee shops being ludicrous and Harry rolling his eyes.

The door opens with a shingle of the bell, and Draco lets go of Harry’s hand to enter behind him. Then they’re holding hands again, Harry tracing his thumb over his palm, and he refuses the urge to shiver.

“One americano, and a caramel macchiato please.”

Draco looks around as Harry orders, eyes sliding past a girl staring at her laptop screen and the small but detailed ornaments littering the tables and stopping at the news on the tv.

And there is it, the slow silence of the scene as a silver-haired man walks out from a building and reporters rush around him. Draco reads the headline with a numbness spreading in his chest.

_Cabinet member Malfoy **interrogated** for tax evasion. The Crown Prosecution Service pushing for criminal charges, as-_

His grip loosens and his hand drops, absentmindedly. Draco doesn’t know why it’s coming to him as a shock-he’d already known, he’d already known that his father was going to be arrested and put to jail, but it’s different from being told by his father’s quivering secretary to seeing it broadcasted on live television.

“Hey,” Harry says, turning around, receipt in hand, then his gaze stops on the telly. “…oh,” Draco looks away, as Lucius Malfoy intones some apology he wouldn’t mean even if his son’s life depended on it.

“Got what he deserved, the bastard.” He says, not meeting Harry’s eyes.

But he’s still my father, a part of him whispers. He’s still the man who brought him chocolate cake after he got elected, the man who yelled at him when he brought Harry home. The man who he had looked up to for _seventeen_ fucking years. 

“He’s still your dad,” Harry answers simply, echoing his thoughts, and guilt churns in his chest, apology tumbling out of his lips.

“Sorry,” Draco mutters, because he knows all too well Harry’s hasn’t even had a father to be mad about. He feels stupid, and young, and naïve. All the things he knows he is.

The green-eyed boy smiles gently. “This isn’t about me,” he hands him the coffee. Caramel and sweet, just as he like it. Harry takes a sip of his comparably bitter drink, and takes his hand again.

“Come on, let’s go.”

And they go.

* * *

All the windows are open. Summer is a weather draped along their skin, a light sheen of sweat filling him with restless energy. His foot taps against his thigh, again and again, and Harry grabs it.

“Stop moving, won’t you?”

“Oi, keep your eyes on the road.” Draco raps his knuckles against Potter’s forearm.

“I would, if you didn’t keep distracting me.”

He rolls his eyes. “Is your playlist over?”

And this time, Harry’s head does spin towards him.

“Are you asking for ‘ _more of those horrible pop songs’_?” He asks, incredulous. Potter has an incredible memory of everything Draco has said when he needs it to use against him. It seems like he has a mental list, Draco suspects. Or at least a post-it, with more of his incorrigible handwriting. Which has high plausibility, because Draco wouldn’t know what it was even if he read it. 

He clasps his hand against Harry’s hand on his ankle, silently reveling in the physical contact. He never knew he had been this pathetic about touches until he met Potter. Well, until he fucked Potter, because there was a _long_ gap between the two.

He sometimes wonders what would have happened if he had loved Harry earlier. If they had _talked_ earlier, if they had mixed and brewed and _burst_ earlier, if he was being stupidly poetic.

But then, he always thinks, he wants _this_ Potter. He wants the eighteen-year-old Potter, who’s addicted to caffeine and whose eyes crease when he smiles and who’s dry remarks he needs to take a moment to understand the humor of. The brilliance hidden behind those, if he was being honest, quite ugly pair of glasses.

“Love you too,” Potter replies, gaze somehow honest and playful at the same time, and Draco blinks, once, twice, before the words make sense to him in a _sentence,_ not separate words.

“What?” He asks, dumbly.

“You had the Look.”

“What look?”

“That _I’m in love with you but I’m too scared to say it_ look.”

He scoffs, ignoring the feeling that his insides had turned outwards to be in plain sight and furthermore, the realization that he could actually get used to the feeling. “I was thinking about how ugly your glasses were,” he says, against a wave of something he knows he can never win.

“Those two thoughts can co-exist.” Harry says simply. “I think your shoes are stupid, but I still love you.”

Draco breathes out shallowly. “Stop saying that.”

“Why?”

“Because-“ _I don’t know how to say it back without sounding like an idiot, and right now you probably think I am one because I’ve stopped mid-sentence and no, I do love you, don’t you dare think otherwise-_

“You don’t have to say it back,” Harry turns his eyes on the road again, lips pressed together. He quirks a small smile. “I’m not that needy.”

 _I’m the needy one,_ Draco thinks, but then the music is on again, washing away his thoughts, and he leans back against the car seat, grasping Harry’s hand like it’s his one and only, his lifeline.

There’s a humming in the air, and it takes him a little more than a moment to realize it’s an anticipation, an apprehension, and an ache.

_It’s a love story, baby just say-_

It is a love story, he understands.

**Author's Note:**

> This is for you, Salad. Happy B-day. I love your writings, the odd little thoughts you have, your passion for everything you love. 
> 
> And I love that you bother to share them with me, Salad, always. 
> 
> This is for the future, for all our taken opportunities, and all our missed falls. Loves and doves and sweet olives. (HAH that does rhyme-okay I'll just be off trying to figure out what the hell I'm gonna do with the next chapter)


End file.
